Why Scientists Are Fooling Animals With Virtual Reality — New technological developments in virtual reality allow researchers to study the neurological basis of decision making in insects, rodents, and other animals. But do roaches truly think the simulation is real, or are they just playing a video game? It’s the Matrix! (Snurched from @DavidBrin1.)

Born This Way — The new weird science of hardwired political identity. Speaking of yesterday’s post. (Via AH.)

Which Way Does Your Blog Lean? — An analysis of political discourse online. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online.

Tennessee “Monkey Bill” Update — Speaking of bugfuck crazy. Ah, conservatives. Ruining education for all of America’s children, not just their own. Yet another reason I can never be a conservative. I just don’t have it in me to force such massive intellectual inconsistency and deep counterfactuals on generations of young minds.

Ann Romney takes to Twitter to defend herself — Take a public stance, deal with the public response. Just be glad you’ll never get the Hillary treatment from Your Liberal Media, Ann. As a conservative, you’re immune to that level of investigation and harassment. Nancy Reagan and both Bush first ladies proved that in spades.

Re-Election Would Allow Obama to Ignore the Left More Than He Already Does — The conservative idea that somehow Obama’s “inner leftist” will be unleashed is just another one of their bizarre fixations. I’m one of those people who voted enthusiastically for Obama from the left last time around, and has been repeatedly disappointed ever since. Trust me, he’s no leftist.

“The new studies, led by Peter Rothwell of Britain’s Oxford University, found that aspirin also has a short-term benefit in preventing cancer, and that it reduces the likelihood that cancers will spread to other organs by about 40 to 50 percent … Perhaps more importantly, they also raise the distinct possibility that aspirin will be effective as an additional treatment for cancer — to prevent distant spread of the disease.”

Anti-metastatic sounds helpful to me, and would lessen inflammation from tissue damage from the chemo.

The author of the prophetic 1981 climate change paper is James Hansen, who is today a very outspoken scientist at NASA still working on climate change. Recently a bunch of conservative deniers wrote a letter to NASA basically asking them to shut up Hansen and take down NASA webpages for anything “unproven.”

I wonder what it’s like to work on something really important for 30+ years, have remarkably good agreement between your predictions and reality for those 30 years, and still be told you’re full of shit and should shut up by political/religious/economic ideologues disguising themselves as skeptics?